Happy Friday. Since it is officially the season, I thought I would show you some Christmas type images today. Downtown Maquoketa suffered a devastating a few years ago and the area was finally cleared and is now a green space (that is available for development.)
This year they put up a very nice Christmas tree for everyone to enjoy. I’ve wanted to photograph it for the last couple of weeks but it has been too cold and or windy (the tree would be moving) to do so. Last night there was no wind and the temperature was a mild 41 degrees so I got to take some shots.
There was a movie a few years ago (I think 2008) called Vantage Point. It was not a good movie but it sucked me in and I watched the whole thing. The movie revolved around one horrific incident and then it would rewind and you would see the same incident from another individual’s point of view. You couldn’t understand the whole incident until you saw all the different vantage points.
Anyway I called the Jones County Sheriff’s Department yesterday about the incident that occurred on November 15th. After talking with their investigator I was satisfied with the answers I received and I am happy to report that as far as I’m concerned the incident is closed. Again it depended on your vantage point as to what the story looked like.
So I set up the tripod in the middle of the green spot and cranked the ISO down to 100. The native ISO for the D3 is 200 but I figured as long as I was taking timed exposures on a tripod it didn’t matter how slow the shutter speed was.
I shot at f10 so I could get a pretty good depth of field and used the 24 – 120 f4 lens. I tried several timed exposures and then some 5 shot HDR exposures. The first two images in this post are HDR images. The one above is a 3 shot HDR. It was originally a 5 shot but the two longest exposures had some cars go through so they had a bunch of annoying red, orange, and white lines running through them.
Although you can see (click to enlarge the image) a thin red line going through the shot I really like this image. I could have spent 40 minutes taking the red line out but maybe it adds something to the image (yes, a red line.) 🙂 Sorry I couldn’t resist.
Finally I wanted to capture a couple of the businesses that were still open. This is the Great Wall. A Chinese restaurant that I have lunch at from time to time. Again I had to make a 3 shot out of this as the two longer exposures were full of lines. I took one of the Main Street Cafe but all the images had cars in them.
That’s it for today. Enjoy your Friday. It is supposed to be a very nice day weather wise. Thank you for checking out my blog. I hope you enjoy what you find here. Be careful.
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